Case study
Validating what makes Expedia Group a great place to work, and finding the stories it wasn’t telling enough.
Background
Expedia Group powers travel for everyone, everywhere. Alongside its consumer brands Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo, it runs a B2B business that gives travel partners technology and distribution, and a travel media network for advertisers.
Laura Masters, Director of Global Employer and Talent Brand, came to the role from Expedia Group’s corporate brand team. After the pandemic, and later a new CEO and leadership team, the employer brand had to keep evolving. As Laura puts it, a brand should be clay that can be shaped, never 100% set in stone.
Brief
- Get an outside view of how talent sees Expedia Group, to test what the team believed were its strengths.
- Find the strengths that talent wasn’t hearing enough about.
- Set a baseline to measure progress quarter over quarter and year over year.
What we do
- We measure Expedia Group’s Employer Brand Index, analyzing public conversation from 130+ sources and scoring all 16 Employer Brand Attributes.
- We show which strengths talent already recognized, and which strong stories were under-discussed.
- We give the team data to prioritize its messaging and to track how it moves over time.
What Expedia Group did with it
The Index confirmed what the team had sensed, and pointed to two areas that deserved more airtime: career journeys at Expedia Group, and its mission and purpose. The team ramped up messaging on both.
It also put people at the center of activation. Social content became more playful and social-first, telling the stories of Expedia Group’s people instead of the company. A new ambassador program invites employees to apply, then trains them, equips them and celebrates the best contributors with travel awards. The Well-Traveled platform, launched through the Black Expedians and Allies community, connects Expedia Group with underrepresented talent.
Expedia Group’s Perspective
We had a sense of a lot of the things we found through running the Employer Brand Index, but it was just so validating. We realized we don’t talk enough about the career journey at Expedia Group, and we’ve got a lot of great things we can celebrate there. So let’s really ramp that up.
It gives us the data to say we’re doing the right thing. Let’s keep doing it. And then we can measure, quarter over quarter, year over year, how we’re moving the needle.
Results
The outcomes include:
- External validation. The Index confirmed the strengths the team believed in, backed by data leadership can see.
- Clear messaging priorities. Career journeys and mission and purpose moved to the center of Expedia Group’s employer brand content.
- A baseline to measure against. The team can now track progress on those priorities quarter over quarter and year over year.
- Momentum across channels. Over the same period, Laura reports that applications doubled in a year and Instagram engagement rose around 200% year over year.
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